Washington – FEMA’s lack of planning, not the failures of state and local officials, was to blame for much of what went wrong with the government’s response to Hurricane Katrina, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told a congressional committee Wednesday.

The assessment by the most senior administration official to face lawmakers since the hurricane struck in late August contrasted sharply with testimony offered earlier by Michael Brown, former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Brown had blamed what he termed the “dysfunction” of Louisiana state and local officials for hobbling the relief effort.

“From my own experience, I don’t endorse those views,” Chertoff said. He told lawmakers that he found the region’s governors and mayors to be responsive as the crisis unfolded.

Chertoff, who took up his post in February, calmly defended his record – including his decision to work from home during part of the weekend before Katrina hit the Gulf Coast – during often hostile questioning from a special House panel.

He denied Brown’s contention that FEMA was “emaciated” after it was folded into the newly created Department of Homeland Security in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. Brown had testified that once it was subsumed into the department, FEMA suffered budget cuts and a “brain drain” of officials.

Chertoff said that between 2001 and 2005, “FEMA’s core funding increased from $349 million (annually) to $447 million,” and its number of employees swelled from 2,057 to 2,445.

The sheer scope of the damage Katrina inflicted overwhelmed FEMA and exposed flaws in its structure and management, Chertoff said. The agency’s balky response to the hurricane stemmed from these problems, not from a lack of funding, he said.

Chertoff said he is taking steps to “retool” FEMA, citing his establishment of emergency reconnaissance teams that can immediately move into disaster areas to assess the situation and prioritize relief efforts.

Despite disputing Brown’s claim that the agency had suffered a “brain drain,” he identified the need to “replenish its ranks at the senior level with experienced staff”‘ as a problem he is starting to remedy.

Chertoff said he learned about New Orleans’ levee breaks only the day after they occurred, then could not find Brown for hours to determine what sort of response he was mounting.

He said that he had trusted Brown, whom he repeatedly referred to as his “battlefield commander,” to handle ground operations and to build a unified command with state and local officials and with the Pentagon.

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